“That’s my profession, looking friendly. I’m not fond of kids,” I said.
“Pretend,” Chambrun said. “And after you’ve got whatever there is to get you won’t be far from Forty-four Jane Street. Nora Sands asked you for help, maybe she’d be willing to give you some in exchange. I take it you wouldn’t find that unpleasant.”
Betsy Ruysdale laughed. “But hellishly dangerous from what I heard on the intercom,” she said.
“Seriously,” Chambrun said. “I think she wants what we do—a killer.”
The curious thing about the Sands situation was that Nora Sands had not actually seen her son, who lived with her, since Thursday night. He had come home Thursday night after his stickball game and before she went to work at the Private Lives Club. He had made his own breakfast on Friday morning while she was still “at work.” He had, Nora supposed, gone to school. He hadn’t come home before she went to work on Friday night. That, Nora had told us, was not unusual. He played stickball late on Fridays because there was no school on Saturday and he had no homework to do. So Nora never saw her son from Thursday night until Saturday morning when Hardy pulled back the tarpaulin from his mangled face at the poolside in the Health Club. My job, in effect, was to find out how Eddie Sands had spent that Friday, what his pattern had been, what had eventually brought him to the Beaumont, which was way off his normal beat.
At today’s prices you don’t cruise around the city in a taxi cab. I took one of the Beaumont’s private cars and headed downtown to the Village. A friendly cop, somewhere in the neighborhood of Sheridan Square, told me where I could find the nightly stickball game—on Thirteenth Street over near Ninth Avenue. The kids were at it under a full head of steam when I parked my car down the block and sauntered toward the game. The people in the neighborhood seemed to have given up any effort to avoid the shouts and screams of excitement, and most of the front steps of the old houses had become a kind of bleachers for those people too old to play.
Stickball is played with a rubber ball, and the bats appear to be made from old broom handles. A fire hydrant was first base; the top off a wooden crate was second base; an overturned garbage can was third. The pitcher throws the ball up to the hitter on one bounce, and I guess, if you’re good at it, you can make the ball take some crazy bounces. They obviously had their own special ground rules. A ball hit fair above the second-floor level of one of the buildings was a home run. A ball hit off a building below that was in play, no matter where it careened to. The kids were playing with such enthusiasm and intensity, punctuated by violent arguments, that I couldn’t see just how I was going to get to talk to any of them, at least while they were still at it.
Then I spotted a young black boy, probably about Eddie Sands’ age, sitting on one of the front steps. He was an enthusiastic rooter, probably a player who was for the moment a wounded warrior. His right ankle was in a cast and a pair of crutches rested on the brownstone steps beside him. I sat down on the step just below him.
“Who’s who?” I asked him.
He gave me a quick look out of bright brown eyes and decided I was safe. “East of Eighth Avenue and west of Eighth Avenue,” he said.
“How did you hurt your ankle?”
“Broke it sliding into the pushcart,” he said.
“The pushcart?”
“Old man Weimer’s pushcart is third base on Tuesday night,” the boy said.
Someone hit a screaming liner down the middle of Thirteenth Street, and the center fielder let it get past him. It was going to be an inside-the-park homer. There were shouts of delight but my young friend pounded the knee on his good leg with both fists.
“Playin’ too far in,” he said. “I told him.” He glanced at me. “I’m the regular center fielder for the west side. That jerk never played there before.”
We watched the next hitter being thrown out in a close play to the fire hydrant.
“Jane Street is east of here,” I said casually. “Eddie Sands must have played for the east team.” He swiveled around to look at me. “Was he any good?”
The brown eyes narrowed. “You some kind of a cop?” he asked.
I grinned at him. “Do I look like one?”
After a moment he shook his head. Score one for Chambrun.
“I’m a friend of Eddie’s mother,” I said. Well, she had asked me for help! “You got a name?”
“Norman,” he said.
“First or last?”
“First—what else?”
“Were you here last Friday, Norman?”
“Every night they play.”
“Eddie played?”
“Sure. I didn’t, because of my ankle. Eddie was the best hitter the east had.”
“You know what’s happened to him?”
“You’d have to be deaf not to hear it on the radio all day,” Norman said. “Do they know who yet?”
“No. Nor why, Norman. That’s why I’m nosing around. He didn’t go home in time for his mother to see him before she went to work on Friday night.”
“We had a hamburger roast after the game last night,” Norman said. “Eddie stuck around.”
“That would have been after dark.”
“We play till we can’t see anymore,” Norman said. “When the street lights come on we quit.”
“You talk to Eddie at all?”
“After the game,” Norman said. “He was a nice guy. He brought me a burger, because I couldn’t move around easy, and a Pepsi.”
“Talk about anything special—like going to watch Stan Nelson’s telethon at the Beaumont?”
“I guess you didn’t know Eddie too well,” Norman said.
“Meaning?”
“If you did you’d know he wouldn’t go to hear Stan Nelson sing if they paid him for it. Eddie didn’t like that kind of music. He was a rock fan. Collected rock records. Never listened to anything else but.”
“Did he tell you how he was going to spend the evening?”
“He didn’t say. I’ve been trying to remember, ever since the news came on the radio. He didn’t say. He was mostly worried about his key.”
“Key?”
“He lost the key to his apartment. He looked all over the street for it after the game. It must have come out of his pocket when he slid into a base or something. Anyhow, he’d lost it and he couldn’t find it.”
“He was worried because he couldn’t get into his apartment?”
“Naw,” Norman said. “He could always go up the fire escape and get into his place. But he was afraid his old lady would be sore at him for losing his key.”
“And he didn’t tell you what he planned to do with the rest of his evening?”
“No reason he should,” Norman said. “He didn’t cowboy around like some of us on Friday nights. He’d usually go home, listen to records, read. He was a great reader.”
“Girls?”
Norman shook his head. “Eddie wasn’t much for girls. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying he was gay. I guess you could say the fire hadn’t got lit under him yet.”
I smiled at the boy. “Not like you,” I suggested.
He rolled his eyes up. “Oh, man!” he said.
“So the last you saw of Eddie last night he was headed home—to climb up his fire escape and spend the evening listening to records and reading?”
“Look, mister, he didn’t say that’s what he was going to do. He didn’t say what he was going to do, except that when he did go home he’d have to go up the fire escape.”
“So you don’t think he had a date?”
“With a chick? Not Eddie.”
“Do any of the kids play cards, or other games, after it’s too dark to play stickball?”
“Not Eddie. He was a kind of loner, except for these east-west games. Sometimes in summer his old lady would give him a few extra bucks and he’d go to Shea Stadium or Yankee Stadium to see a real ball game. He was a real freak for baseball. But not last night. Last night he was just worrying about his los
t key.”
We were, I thought, suddenly living in a world of keys.
Norman had been friendly enough but he hadn’t advanced me very far. Up till dark on Friday night Eddie Sands had followed a usual routine. If he’d had any special plans for after the stickball game he hadn’t confided them to Norman.
I left the stickball game, still going strong, and went back to my car. The second part of my job was to talk to Nora Sands in the hope that she might have come up with something useful now that the shock of Eddie’s death was a few hours old.
I drove east to Jane Street and found myself in the middle of some kind of excitement there. Three police cars and an ambulance were parked on the north side of the street, and a small crowd of people were milling around. I parked and walked along the street to where number 44 should be. When I got there I found that number 44 was the center of whatever was going on. A cop was standing in the doorway, and the people outside were looking up at the upper windows.
The cop stopped me as I started to go into the building.
“You live here?” he asked me.
“No. Just calling on a friend,” I told him.
“What friend?” He was a tough-looking cookie.
“Miss Sands—if it’s any of your business,” I said.
“It’s my business,” the cop said. “Just stand aside a minute.”
From inside the building came the ambulance crew, carrying someone on a stretcher. I couldn’t get a glimpse of the sick or injured person. The stretcher was rolled into the ambulance and it took off, siren wailing.
Two other men had followed the stretcher from the house. One of them was obviously a plainclothes cop, the other was a handsome guy, well over six feet, wearing a tan gabardine suit, white shirt and tie, nicely polished brown shoes.
“What I have here, Sergeant,” the cop said, “is a gentleman caller.” He suddenly had hold of my arm with fingers.
The plainclothes cop gave me an ice-blue stare. “I’m Sergeant Keller, Ninth Precinct,” he said. “Your name, please.”
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“Your name, Buster!” the uniformed cop said, and his fingers bit into my arm so hard my knees buckled.
“My name is Mark Haskell,” I said.
“Address?”
“I’m the public relations director for the Beaumont Hotel, I live there.”
Keller’s ice-blue eyes narrowed. “You’ve had a couple of homicides up there today. You were calling on Miss Sands?”
“I am calling on Miss Sands,” I said.
“You’ll have to try St. Vincent’s Hospital,” Keller said. “That was Miss Sands they just took off in the ambulance. You got any I.D. on you, Mr. Haskell?”
“I have. And if you want a character reference you might try Lieutenant Hardy of Manhattan Homicide.”
“I will,” Keller said.
“What happened to her?” I asked, as I handed him my wallet, complete with driver’s license, Social Security card, and three different credit cards.
“Somebody broke in, beat her up badly, probably robbed the joint. It’s torn to pieces.” Keller glanced at my credentials and handed back my wallet. “Just a social call?” he asked.
I didn’t like him. The cop had loosened his grip on my arm and I shook it free. “Some law against it?” I asked.
“Maybe there ought to be,” Keller said.
I liked him even less. He was suggesting that I might be the customer of a high-class prostitute.
“I came down to this part of town, with the full knowledge of Lieutenant Hardy,” I said, “to try to find some of Eddie Sands’ friends—the kids he played stickball with. We were trying to trace out his day yesterday. His mother hadn’t seen him since the day before. I talked to one of his friends, and then I came around here, hoping Miss Sands might have recovered enough to remember something that bypassed her this morning. I just walked up the front steps when Knucklehead here stopped me.”
The cop reached for my arm again but I took a quick step away from him.
“I guess you’re clean, Mr. Haskell,” Keller said. “I’ll know where to reach you if I need you.” He turned to the tall man in the gabardine suit. “The same goes for you, Reverend.”
Keller beckoned to the cop and they took off for one of the police cars. The tall guy held out his hand to me.
“I’m Len Martin,” he said. He could have been a movie star, Gary Cooper type. Nicely tanned, fortyish I guessed. The way he gave me his name was as if I was supposed to know who he was. I took his hand. The grip was firm.
He saw that I’d drawn a blank. “The Reverend Leonard Martin, leader of the New Morality,” he said.
I realized now where I’d seen him—TV news, newspapers. He was handsome enough to interest the press photographers. There are suddenly hundreds of these “morality” groups around the country. The Reverend Leonard Martin is one of the chief crusaders against sex, violence, and raunchy language on television. He’s also made quite a splurge trying to close up porno bookstores and so-called massage parlors in the Times Square area.
“You’re a friend of Nora Sands?” he asked me. He had a deep, resonant voice like you can produce with a foot pedal on an organ.
“I met her for the first time this morning when she came to the Beaumont, where I work, to identify the body of her murdered son.”
“What a ghastly business,” he said. “We live in a time when violence multiplies like … like …”
“Rabbits,” I suggested.
He gave me a thin frown. I realized I’d suggested sex! You have to watch your step with the Reverend Leonard Martins of this world.
“You know more of what happened here than the police sergeant told me?” I asked him.
“I was, unluckily, the person who found her,” Martin said. “Unlucky for me, perhaps lucky for her. I called the police and they sent an ambulance. The ambulance doctor doesn’t think her chances are too good, but if there’d been much more delay he thinks she’d have had no chance at all.”
“Was she able to talk?” I asked.
Martin shook his head. “Beaten senseless,” he said. “First thing I did was feel for a pulse. It was almost nonexistent.”
“How did you happen to be the one to find her?”
He looked down at his hands. I saw that his fingernails were well manicured. “I take it you know something about the work I do,” he said.
“You manage to get plenty of publicity, Mr. Martin.”
“Publicity is important in getting the general public, the people, lined up on our side,” he said. “The police, the courts, the politicians aren’t much help to us. We have to stir up public outrage to make any headway at all.”
“What does that have to do with your finding Nora Sands?”
“I have been given a new assignment by the higher-ups in my organization,” he said.
“I suppose you were the top man,” I said.
“I am, I suppose you would say, the out-front man,” he said. “I take my orders from a council of elders. My job at the moment is to focus on, close down if possible, the pornographic empire of a man named Zachary Thompson. You’ve heard of Private Lives Magazine and the Private Lives clubs scattered all over the country?”
“I know about them, of course. I had the dubious pleasure of meeting Zach Thompson only this morning. He came to the hotel to help Nora Sands.”
He nodded. “He makes a pretense of ‘taking care’ of his people. I have, in the past few weeks, been focusing my attention on the Private Lives Club here in the Village.”
“As a customer?” I have to admit I don’t have a very high opinion of these professional moral crusaders. They go to all the raunchy movies, watch all the sex and violence on TV, read all the porno books, and then tell the rest of us we must lay off. I remember talking to Chambrun about it once and he said they appeared to be “on a Peeping Tom road to Heaven. What fun!” I have never cottoned to having someone tell me what I should read, or l
ook at, or drink, or whether I should make love to a lady who attracts me, in or out of wedlock! It’s my life and I don’t want it dictated to by a Big Brother. The Reverend Leonard Martin, hanging around with Zach Thompson’s Private Lives girls and then expressing his outrage, seemed somewhat grotesque to me. I could be wrong about him, I knew. He could be on the level, a genuine do-gooder, but I didn’t want his code of morals imposed on me.
“The glamor of the Private Lives clubs is a cover for open prostitution,” Martin said. “The authorities pay no attention to it. I meant to—I mean to—work up a legal case against them that they can’t sidestep.”
“Let’s go back a few yards,” I said. “You say you found Nora Sands upstairs here in her apartment, near death.”
“Nora is called a ‘hostess’ at the Private Lives Club,” he said. I had the feeling he was trying to justify some action of his. “In my father’s day she would have been called ‘the madam.’ Thompson knows that I’m out to get him.”
“And yet you’re welcomed as a customer?”
“It’s a public place,” Martin said. “It’s not like an old-fashioned speakeasy where you have to have a password to get in. The first time I went there Thompson spotted me. He knew why I was there and yet he rolled out a red carpet for me. I could see, or go anywhere in the club I wanted. Nora Sands was turned over to me as a guide and question-answerer. Drinks were on the house except that I don’t drink. Coffee and sandwiches were courtesy of the management. Nora—Miss Sands—couldn’t have been a more gracious hostess. It took me a while to realize that the regular goings-on had come to a dead stop while I was there. Nora wanted me to believe that it was just a place where lonely men could find pleasant company—a few drinks, a little food, a pretty girl to talk to, maybe to dance with. In the process of trying to sell me on a lie I came to realize that Nora was an extraordinary woman, warm, with wit and humour, concerned with raising a son she admitted was illegitimate. I knew what she had been and what she was, but I couldn’t help liking her, wishing I could—could turn her life around, set her on the road to salvation.” He hesitated a moment. “I’m afraid I lost sight of my main objective for a while. Nora became my cause, almost without my realizing it I wanted to get her away from there, to set her on a new road, to supply her with new values.”
With Intent to Kill Page 8
